64. This is as Alice-in-Wonderlandish as it gets...

--upside down, inside out and backwards.

1. In the United States, 75% of the votes are 'counted' by ONE. PRIVATE. FAR RIGHT-WING-CONNECTED. CORPORATION--ES&S, which bought out Diebold--using 'TRADE SECRET' code--code that the public is forbidden to review--with half the states doing NO AUDIT AT ALL (automatic comparison of electronic results to ballots--most because they HAVE NO ballot), and the other half doing a miserably inadequate 1% audit. And even if the fingernails of secretaries of state are pulled out and they are forced to do a recount--in the states that CAN do a recount--they only do 3% or so.

2. According to statisticians, and computer and election experts, 10% is the minimum audit needed to detect fraud in an electronic system.

3. Venezuela votes electronically, but uses OPEN SOURCE CODE--code that anyone may review and that belongs to the PUBLIC--and they do a whopping 55% audit--more than five times the minimum needed to detect fraud. Furthermore, Venezuelan elections are closely monitored by all the major election monitoring groups, by invitation of the Venezuelan government--the OAS, the EU, Unasur, the Carter Center and others, and Jimmy Carter recently said that Venezuela has "the best election system in the world." These groups do not just drop in on election day and make pronouncements. They help set up the system and monitor it all along the way. They KNOW what's needed--as to audits and other requirements of honest, transparent elections--and have repeatedly validated Venezuela's elections, including THIS election.

4. The U.S. State Department (Obama, H. Clinton) helped to legitimize the fascist military coup in Honduras by THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT holding an 'election' UNDER MARTIAL LAW, using entities like John McCain's INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICAN INSTITUTE to 'monitor' the voting. (John McCain has telecommunications and other interests in Honduras.) No reputable elections group in the world would touch that election. Talk about 'illegitimate.' Honduras has since become a Colombia-like killing field, as rightwing death squads murder hundreds of labor leaders, teachers, community activists, leftist politicians, journalists and others, and inflict a reign of terror on Hondurans, with every kind of oppression.

5. The U.S. (Obama, H. Clinton) did the same thing in Haiti--phoney election in which the party that represents 70% of Haitians was banned from the ballot!

6. As Mark Weisbrot has pointed out, the leftist Manual Obrador in Mexico lost the presidential election in 2005 by only 0.05% of the vote. Millions of Mexicans demanded a recount of Mexico's largely paper ballot system (but with highly riggable, PRIVATE electronics at the top of the chain, which the Bush Junta helped Mexico put in place). The U.S. (Bush Junta) immediately endorsed the rightwing candidate, Felipe Calderon (who also, like the fascists in Honduras and Colombia, has engaged in violent repression against labor leaders, community activists and peasants, in Oaxaca, and furthermore invited the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" into Mexico, for a bloodbath in the border areas--some 50,000 dead!) Why was that much closer election "legitimate" while Venezuela's (1.6% difference), with all of its safeguards and above-board systems, is not?

I am writing this for those of you who know instinctively that this U.S. government demand that Venezuela do a 100% recount is absurd. Your instincts are correct. I am also writing it for those who know nothing about these matters: Half the states in the U.S. cannot even DO a recount! Our system is 100% RIGGABLE by corporate CEO's whose far rightwing connections would make your hair stand on end.

Obama should be calling for 100% recounts HERE! Why isn't he? Why are our Democratic leaders as silent as the dead about OUR egregiously riggable system--and instead beat up on Venezuela, where they CAN prove, and HAVE proven, who was elected?

Not one elected official in this country can prove that he or she was actually elected. Not Obama. Not anybody else. NOT ONE OF THEM! Our system is UNVERIFIABLE, and has been rendered unverifiable DELIBERATELY--methodically, knowingly--and we can only wonder why and who is really calling the shots. WHO is picking and choosing among our already compromised and LIMITED political candidates--drenched with money, pandering to Corporate Media, and with ES&S/Diebold's noose around all of their necks? WHO is choosing who to give our power and our sovereignty TO? WHO is choosing our rulers? And are those "dark actors" the ones responsible for the wretchedness of this unrepresentative Congress, for the shackles on Obama, for the loony rightwing governors and state legislatures we see, and for the obvious wars being waged against the poor majority and all progressive policy?

And Obama--who surely knows all of this, and has to have agreed to it (along with other "deals" like no prosecution--and not even investigation--of Bush Junta war criminals)--dares to demand a 100% recount of Venezuela's election--a country whose president and whose poor majority DID EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to ensure a clean, honest, verifiable election system?!

It is just bizarre. It really is. Upside-down, inside out and backwards.

We really, really, REALLY need to understand this--however difficult and demoralizing it seems to be--because it is REALITY. Our system is rigged. It is anti-democratic, even to the very 'counting' of our votes. And it is producing office-holders--holders of OUR power as a people--who are clearly NOT acting in our interests, and are interfering against the peoples' interests in other countries--not just in the war zones of the Middle East but also in our own hemisphere. We need to face this. We need to expose it. We need overcome it--peacefully and democratically.

That is a difficult project, to say the least. But, hey, the people of this country have faced difficult projects before--on our long road to a fairer and more progressive society. We owe it to those who went before us, to straighten out the goddamned fascist disaster that has fallen upon us, starting with Reagan. And if Latin Americans--who have suffered so much grief at the hands of our ruling powers--can throw off those shackles, as they are doing in country after country, so can we.

The powers that control Obama KNOW that Latin America is undergoing a vast, deep, grass roots, leftist democracy revolution, and that Venezuela is the pioneer and inspirer of this amazing revolution. It has swept through most of South America, with strong leftists elected and re-elected in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and soon to be re-elected in Chile (after a miserable rightwing hiatus), and into Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras until the coup). Their Corporate Media are doing their best to keep this information from us, precisely because they FEAR that we, too, will be inspired with democracy once again. And they REQUIRE their hand-picked office holders to LIE about Latin America's democracy revolution continuously and to engage in anti-democratic plots--with twisted lies like this one, about a 100% recount, and with worse.

Obama is obediently LYING. He has no other choice. And that lie--like the lie about the "constitutional crisis" in Honduras--is the visible element of a destabilization and overthrow plot, that Obama may or may not be in control of. I DO think that Obama was elected, by the way, but he was also PERMITTED TO BE elected, and that is the problem. We have been deliberately deprived of verifiable elections--and we had better be aware of how vulnerable this makes us to FUTURE Bush Juntas, beyond the misery of seeing a Democratic president propose cuts to Social Security and all our other current miseries. Worse is not only possible; it is likely, and it is all set up to have the APPEARANCE of legitimacy with no legitimacy at all.